http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/the-student-built-website-that-keeps-government-climate-data-safe-20170221
[When my colleagues and I got wind a few years ago that the Canadian
government was going to start removing scientific papers and reports
related to the Beaufort Sea Project, we did something similar. AFAIK,
the Remote Energy Security Technologies Collaborative (RESTCo) website
is now the only complete repository of this information.
http://www.restco.ca/BSP_Reprints.shtml
We need more citizen scientists, and more people engaged in making sure
that knowledge is not lost in the modern era equivalent of book burnings.
Websites are cheap, including lots of storage space. It doesn't take
much skill to download files from an existing website, and then upload
them again to a new one. And there are tools to make it even easier and
less tedious than doing it manually. Do an Internet search on 'website
copy tool' and get about 159,000,000 hits. HTTrack is free.
links in on-line article]
The Student-Built Website That Keeps Government Climate Data Safe
Since Trump’s election, scientists have been scrambling to save climate
change data sets. And one Michigan graduate student thought the more
copies, the better.
Terri Hansen posted Feb 21, 2017
It wasn’t long after President Trump took office that chaos took hold at
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Throughout his campaign, Trump
had promised to get rid of the agency, leaving just “little tidbits
left.” He wasted little time.
Out of the gate, Trump’s transition team was set to remove former
President Barack Obama’s Climate Action Plan and other climate data,
reported InsideEPA on Jan. 17. Trump officials told EPA staff on Jan. 24
to remove the agency’s climate change page from its website, according
to Science. The next day, EPA staffers were told to hold off. Then, two
days later, the words “climate change” were erased from the EPA site
altogether. Then they were back.
Many scientists didn’t wait to find out what was up, what was down, or
what was going which way. At risk was years of data on greenhouse gas
emissions, temperature trends, sea level rise, and shrinking sea
ice—data essential to our understanding of the enormous environmental
shifts our planet is undergoing. Worldwide, they scrambled to capture
the information from the websites of the EPA, NASA, National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, and the United States Geological Survey.
Hackathons were organized to download the data to university servers and
sites like DataRefuge and the Internet Archive for the fear that Scott
Pruitt would be confirmed as head of the EPA; he was confirmed by the
Senate on Friday.
Even outside of scientific circles, concerned citizens recognized a need
to act. When John Rozsa, a graduate student in technology studies at
Eastern Michigan University, heard about these efforts, he thought the
more copies, the better. So, between classes and his full-time job, he
began to download the pre-Trump version of the EPA website—28,000 files
and counting.
“I used a variety of Windows and Linux-based high-tech tools that look
at every corner of the website and grab every single file,” he said. “I
repeated the process four times, and then compared the data sets. Once I
confirmed my data sets were reliable, I backed them up, and then sorted
the files.”
Now he’s uploading the files to a website he calls EPA Data Dump. It’s
very simplistic, he said, “due to the fact that less than one week ago
the website was just a small project of mine.” The website is not quite
ready for prime time—it’s still under construction—but already it’s
getting a lot of attention.
EPA Data Dump has seen over 200,000 users to date, so much traffic that
its server nearly crashed. Rozsa had to start a modest online fundraiser
to pay for a dedicated server, more bandwidth, and increased security.
The site will soon include a search engine, he said, but first the files
must be organized by librarians and other volunteers.
Already many people, including an aerospace data manager, have offered
their skills to further the project. And Rozsa has received messages
from students and individuals in academia who said the data on his
website have helped them significantly.
Rozsa has degrees in computer science and technology management. He is
now studying for his master’s degree in technology studies, and he calls
himself an activist. One audience that appreciates his type of activism
is journalists who cover science and the environment.
“Journalists and the public rely on the EPA’s website for accurate
public information about climate change, EPA regulatory actions,
greenhouse gas emissions, and other pollution data,” said Bobby Magill,
senior science writer at Climate Central and president of the Society of
Environmental Journalists. “It’s among the first places members of the
public may go to find information about climate change and how human
carbon dioxide and methane pollution contribute to it.”
Ensuring that accurate information remains available to the public is
critical to understanding government efforts to keep our air and water
clean and to address climate change. “The EPA greenhouse gas emissions
database is valuable because it helps journalists and the public
identify emissions sources and trends,” Magill said. “There is an
inherent public good in maintaining those databases online so that
accurate environmental information is available to the public.”
When Rozsa created EPA Data Dump, he did so believing that the public
should have access to information about climate change, regardless of
who the president was. For many scientists, whose individual decades of
study are built on generations of accumulated research, open access to
information is essential.
“Any climate data that has been collected and published by government
scientists, or as a result of government-funded or government-sponsored
research, belongs in the public domain,” said Michael Mann, professor
and director of the Pennsylvania State University Earth System Science
Center and lead-author of the now-famous “hockey stick graph” of rising
global average temperatures.
“The public has a right to know that it is safe and that it will be
preserved for posterity, despite the fluctuations in the prevailing
political winds,” he said. “The fact that scientists are fearful that
climate data inconvenient to the vested interests that have funded
President Trump and congressional republicans will be scrubbed from
government websites is a testament to the truly chilling nature of the
fossil fuel industry-funded assault on climate science.”